Writer in the Forest

Chapter 13

“Can you come?”

I arrived to find Mom sitting on the floor in the bedroom doorway. She had her big plastic pillbox in her hand, and several bottles of pills on the floor. I triaged Mom’s condition and saw that she couldn’t get up. What was she doing with her pills these days? I should have helped sooner.

“Let me see if these are right,” I said, taking the box from her. Up until now, they had always taken care of the complicated ordering of the medicines from out of state, and the filling of all the little compartments in the pill box. Harry took twenty-nine pills a day; Mom fourteen for blood pressure, thinner blood, arthritis, anxiety, pain. She told me it took her half a day to fill the 7-day pillbox.

I sat down on the floor by Mom and started reading labels on the prescription bottles and counting the pills already in the box. It wasn’t right.  A little heavy on the narcotics.

“I might have to go to a nursing home.”

I called the ambulance for the third time this week.

Thanks Mom, for being so brave and making it easy on me. A few weeks later I would understand that she only meant temporarily, to “get on her feet”. But for me, sitting on the floor with Mom, I knew it was the beginning of a very big heartbreaking change for my parents. We cried,  Mom and I. Harry sat helplessly on the bed, weak and slightly confused. While Mom and I sat in the doorway together, I mentally tabulated the reasons for taking Mom out of the home she loved so much. Neither one of them could clean, cook, shop, or wash clothes. They could no longer mow, trim, rake or haul the garbage cans out. In spite of the safety bars we installed on the tub, I worried they’d fall. Mom told me Harry was having “bathroom problems”. She was unable to clean  it up.

I made  my head fit against the doorjamb. The black clouds over Bremerton were spitting rain down on the house. There was a storm coming all right, and we all knew it. A week ago, out of the blue, they told me they wanted to change their will and make me, the younger child, the executor. The lawyer quickly came to the house, and a new will was drawn. Bill out, Vickie in. I hoped he wouldn’t think I asked for this. No one would ask for this.

I went to the door and waited for the ride that changed our lives. On that visit to the Emergency room, I slipped a note to the doctor, requesting a nursing home for Mom. She was right again. I knew when it was time.

Read Full Post »

Chapter 12

I needed a good long walk into the woods to think things through, so I headed up the other side of the Skoke to see if I could make it to Big Log Camp, over five miles in. I don’t have much energy. I’m edgy, and from the get-go I hear noises in the woods, but the only thing I pass that has a face is a guy with a chainsaw doing some trail maintenance.

Mom’s world consists of smoking cigarettes while she lay on the sofa with a heating pad. Some days I go to their house and Mom is still in bed, looking kind of dazed, hopeless. If she gets up at all, she sits at the kitchen table in her dustcoat, smoking for hours and staring straight ahead.

She is dependent on prescription painkillers, sleeping pills, and anti-anxiety drugs. She rarely leaves the house or gets dressed.

They can no longer keep up with the house or yard work. The entire width of their small lot is a border of Mom’s pink roses. As she neglected them they quit producing and now the dead blossoms are left on the stem year-round.

In between trips to the hospital (and by trips, I mean all night), working, buying their groceries, cleaning the refrigerator, mowing the lawn and handpicking the grass out from the brick pathway, washing curtains and making several failed attempts to clean the basement, I’ve tried to save Mom’s roses. I’ve consulted books, asked questions, and did my best. I can’t seem to stop them from dying.

I understand that elderly folks don’t metabolize drugs very well, and are often over drugged because of it. Her back pain is so great that she’s taking more and more narcotics with less and less benefit. Harry is worn out with the midnight rides to the hospital for more drugs. Now he just calls an ambulance because Mom figured out the wait was shorter if you arrived by aid car.

I don’t know what to do next. I just go with the flow, whatever hits me each day and make decisions when I need to. I’m really too tired for this long hike and where is the river, anyway? Why would anyone construct a trail that doesn’t stay by the river?

[Note to journal]: In the end I documented 63 hospital visits in one year. We’d have Harry in the ER one night with heart failure or infections from dialysis, and Mom in the ER the next night with pain, a heart attack, heart failure, or breathing problems. If I had known what was in front of me, I  swear I would have thrown myself in the river.

I trudge on, figuring I’ll know it when I see it. I take breaks sitting on bumpy rocks and getting my butt all muddy. Finally I get there, and Big Log Camp and the river are both revealed. Now we’re talkin’.

Big Log Camp

And it appears someone is up here besides me. I relax my death grip on my pepper spray. Funny how when you’re in the deepest woods people can be all around you and you don’t know it.

To sleep in there must feel like a giant green and brown god has its arms wrapped around you. Cranky or not, the tree doesn’t mind. Just come on in and sleep awhile.

I reached my goal and it’s the end of the trail for me. I’m jumpy as hell about bears way up here by myself. I’m in too deep. No answers here today.

I hiked out a little faster than I hiked in and made a bee line back to Bremerton to the one person who knew all the answers. There, all sweaty and bedraggled in my hiking gear I barged in and blurted out my question: How will I know when it’s time for a nursing home?

Mom’s voice rose above the Wheel of Fortune as she said, “You’ll know”.

I hoped to hell she was right.

Read Full Post »

Chapter 11

On holidays, my nearly deaf Grandma would slowly sneak through the little house to the kitchen for a little nip, unaware her grandkids – the entity known as mike-uh-billy-uh-freddy-uh-susie-uh-vickie-uh-dede – were hiding behind her and laughing at her serious expression as she threw back a few snorts.

But when Grandma’s speech was slurred, it had nothing to do with vodka. Small strokes. Mom and I visited Grandma in the nursing home often. Mom felt guilty and would tell me she knew she couldn’t take care of Grandma at the house. Together we’d take her popcorn balls and Twinkies. Sometimes I’d walk the four blocks to the decrepit nursing home by myself and chat with Grandma about the olden days.

In 1978 Grandma lay dying at the ripe old age of ninety-four, her watery eyes on the wall but staring inwardly at something we couldn’t see. She’d lived her long life and was probably reliving it. I said goodbye to her silver curls and her hands, identical to mine. She couldn’t lift her head, hadn’t been able to walk, wouldn’t know my name right now. The old girl had a lot of moss on her. And I loved her.

Mom and I watched over Grandma for hours. We didn’t say much, just stayed close. We eventually went home, feeling helpless.

At sunrise, the phone rang. I buried my face in my pillow, crying for the Grandma I would never see again.

I wondered how Mom could live without her mother, but she never cracked, never shed a tear because Grandma was in a better place.

I just kept it to myself that I wasn’t sure my Grandma was anyplace anymore.

Read Full Post »

Chapter 10

The trail to the theater

I sat in the dirt and marvelled how nothing had changed since the first day I had seen the Forest Theater. Mom had brought me here when I was a kid. She said it was her special place. Mom said they’d had to build slides down the hills to get the lumber down. I’d run up the bank and jumped off over and over that day, my sweater flying behind me. I was Supergirl. For a few weeks, anyway. Her new boyfriend was with us. His name was Bob.

The valley was discovered in 1909 by members of the Mountaineers Club, intending to hike to Wildcat Lake. They kept returning, entertaining each other with skits held in different clearings.

The Mountaineer’s amphitheater

The skits eventually became plays. They terraced the bank to make the amphitheater, cutting only the trees they needed for light.

Behind the ancient theater is Chico Creek. I’ve waded in it, fished it, sunbathed on its low-runoff “islands”, and forded it.

Chico Creek

But mostly, I just sit here in the theater and watch the play that is my life. Like today, as I try to figure out how to keep my parents in their house. They’re getting older; things are going south. I look on the bright side. Growing old is about as natural as, well, this wild place. It’s just wrong when people die too soon, for stupid reasons like drinking.

I hurried in from my date, late for my trip to the hospital to see my birth Dad. I stopped dead in my tracks.  My mother’s face was wet and for a moment she looked like Tragedy, the mask. I glanced at Harry, who looked away.

“Your father’s dead.”

Her hands reached out as her face crumbled. Harry studied his shoes, then got up and turned off the television.

I’d seen my Dad yesterday, for maybe the third time in the eleven years since we left him.  He looked too old to be my father and seemed humiliated that I should find him malnourished and broken. I promised I’d be back tonight.

“I was supposed to be there.”

“I know, but you have to live your life. He was a good man but for the drinking. Remember that.”

So many questions to ask, so many things to say, but I realized talking to my Dad would just happen in my head now. The world had fallen silent.

Timber down.

He’d crashed to the ground, alone, with no one there to hear the sound.

Read Full Post »